For Ruka
by Kit Spooner
Summary: Ten years later, Juri plants a garden. Juri/Ruka. (Prize fic for Sophie) [complete draft]


This is the ridiculously belated prize for a fanfiction contest from the CCSFWML that I owed Sophie for months and months. I've had this little ficlet finished for a while, but I kept meaning to edit it and completely rehash the story. I never got around to it, so after a little cosmetic revision, here it is. I love Juri and Ruka, so I just couldn't resist writing this piece of mush. And of course, while I don't presume to have any ownership of the Utena world, I _did_ write this story, so don't steal it. It would make me cry.   
  
  
  


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**For Ruka**

A Shoujo Kakumei Utena Fanfic 

by Kit Spooner   
  
  
  


In the end, she never found his grave. In fact, his family refused to acknowledge that Tsuchiya Ruka ever existed at all. 

Juri couldn't quite rationalize her desire to seek out the final resting place of the former fencing club captain, but it became something of a mission. Nearly ten years after she graduated and escaped the poisonous atmosphere of Ohtori Academy she found herself returning once more to the wrought-iron gates, the rose-gates that haunted the ambiguously terrifying dreams she had nearly every night. 

To her relief, she immediately noted how dramatic the changes were to her former school. The Chairman's tower was gone completely and a soccer field had been installed on the flattened, bulldozed lawn below. There were several other key buildings absent, and a few new arrivals. Roses were everywhere, burgundy and yellow and white and champagne-apricot colored. There were no green or blue ones, however. And no orange ones. 

Ohtori had been her starting point for her search; it had taken a generous donation to the school before she was allowed to view the records for "Tsuchiya, Ruka (deceased)." But once she had located what remained of Ruka's living family, she found that they were rather less than cooperative. Even Juri, a champion at reading faces, had no idea whether the Tsuchiya clan was hiding information about Ruka, or whether they were truly ignorant of what had happened so many years ago at Ohtori. 

So she returned once more to the Academy. There she met with the new Chairman, a short, prematurely-balding man with a budding Napoleonic complex. They disliked each other on sight, but he was so intimidated by the infamous Arisugawa Juri, with her runway-model fashions and her breathtaking beauty, that he was quite obliging. Juri's eventual request was fairly atypical but she had enough pull at the school to ensure that she would eventually get her way. 

The weasely little Chairman offered, of course, to put Juri up in the five-star hotel popular with the wealthy, visiting parents of students. And Juri refused, of course, preferring to take over the small guest house on the edge of the campus. The Chairman, horrified, asked her where her staff would be staying while she was crammed into the tiny cottage. 

"I have no staff," Juri replied coolly. 

The Chairman stared at her, as though unable to imagine the Arisugawa heiress traveling without a full entourage of maids, butlers, cooks, porters, and coachmen. 

"I'm going to be requiring a small plot of land, out of the way of the students," Juri continued briskly. It wouldn't do to waste any more time with this ignorant little man. 

The man blinked and regained most of his composure, straightening up to his full -- though still insignificant -- height. "What for, may I ask?" 

"I'm putting in a memorial garden for a former student," Juri replied. "I'll also need the names of some local garden suppliers and perhaps the use of a truck to haul supplies. I'd like to speak with your groundskeeper too. He'll be able to advise me on the best way to go about this." 

"A garden, Miss Arisugawa?" The Chairman seemed completely stunned. "You want to put in a garden?" 

"That's what I said," Juri snapped. "Now where can I find the groundskeeper?" 

The little Chairman made a few more feeble protests, but eventually led Juri around to the back of one of the maintenance buildings and introduced her to Mr. Araki, Head Gardener at Ohtori. It took nearly ten minutes for Juri to get rid of the Chairman, but when he was gone, Juri was finally able to speak plainly to the groundskeeper. 

"I'm putting in a garden," she told him. "I was hoping you'd be able to find me a good location. I'll need a good deal of sun, I believe. And good drainage." 

Araki chewed on the inside of his cheek in a contemplative sort of manner. "There are several good patches of dirt around Ohtori." He gave Juri a measuring stare, taking in her neatly coiffed hair and her Italian leather shoes. "I should be able to spare a few of my gardeners to do the labor for you, Miss." 

"That won't be necessary, thanks," Juri demurred. "I'll be doing the work myself." 

Araki raised one untidy, graying eyebrow skeptically. 

Juri smiled for the first time in several days. "This is just my traveling suit," she noted wryly. "And I brought boots and such for mucking about in the dirt. I won't need to steal any of your staff, just a shovel, a wheelbarrow, and a trowel, I think." 

The aging gardener gave Juri another long, skeptical look, but eventually returned her smile warmly. "You might need a little more equipment than that, Miss, but all you'll have to do is ask for it. Come with me and I'll give you a list of the local shops that will be helping you." 

Juri spent nearly two hours with Mr. Araki that afternoon. The old man was a welcome relief from the sniveling favor-seeking of the Chairman, and the imperiously ignorant glares of the Tsuchiya family. In the end, she left his tiny office with a list of names, phone numbers and addresses of gardening stores, an enormous encyclopedia of herb cultivation, and a key to the storage shed where all of the tools and gardening implements were neatly organized. 

Then the gardener led her to the plot of land he suggested she use for her garden. Juri had vague, smokey memories of that particular courtyard, framed by two-storey, open-air, covered walkways and tiled colonnades, but the memories never resolved themselves into anything but an amorphous sense of unease. In the very center of the abandoned courtyard was a sagging structure of wrought-iron and shattered glass. Juri's unsettled memories told her that it had been a glass greenhouse and that someone had grown roses in an astonishing range of unnatural colors withing the glittering confines of the little building. Now, most of the glass was gone and the iron frame was in disrepair. The little cupola was missing entirely, as was a good portion of the north side. As she approached, Juri realized that the concrete floor had buckled over the years; an enormous hedge of thorny suckers and vines had thrust through the ruined floor and climbed vigorously up the remains of the iron latticework. 

"What happened here?" Juri finally asked, her voice quiet as she stood on the threshold of the ruined building. 

"Not sure," Araki admitted honestly. "I hear that there was a sort of gardening club that grew roses in here. They disbanded more than a decade ago and no one's had the heart to tend to this mess ever since." 

"And you think this would be a good place for my garden . . ." Juri frowned, her sense of unease beginning to clarify into the nagging worry that always heralded the arrival of an unpleasant memory. 

"Here's what we'll do," the gardener began, idly toeing the crumbled floor with his steel-toed boot. "If you give me and my men three days, we'll have this all cleaned up and ready for you to use." He bent down and pulled a long shard of faceted glass from the rubble. "This will make for a lovely garden, but we'll need to get all the glass and rusty old iron out of the way. We'll even rip out what's left of the floor, along with all these brambles." 

"Oh, I couldn't possibly impose upon you like that," Juri immediately replied. Her memorial for a classmate -- whom she only vaguely remembered -- was turning into a complex and troublesome enterprise. 

"Ah, don't trouble yourself about it, Miss," Araki said, waving his hand expansively. "I've been meaning to clean up this courtyard for a few years now. You just give me a reason to actually getting around to it." 

Juri found that she couldn't quite refuse the guileless smile of the old gardener and eventually agreed to return in three days with her plan and all of her supplies. 

So Juri learned the basics of gardening. She frequented the local garden suppliers like some sort of manic obsessive, picking up the odd tools and bags of fertilizer, mulch, and various potting mediums. On the third day, she bought dozens of plants, from seedlings in tiny plastic trays to a cumbersome elder sapling, its roots carefully trimmed and wrapped in burlap for transport. In the evenings, she sat curled up in the window seat of her cottage, reading the herb encyclopedia by the light of the single, antique lamp. 

She didn't think about Ruka once. _Not_ _once._

When Juri awoke just after dawn on the fourth day, she found the old groundskeeper leaning comfortably against her doorframe. "Morning," he mumbled amiably when she opened the door. "Your garden's ready for planting, Miss." 

And indeed it was. Araki and his staff had worked wonders on the collapsing greenhouse. There wasn't a hint of glass anywhere, not on the ground, not still caught between frames of blackened iron. The wrought iron frame of the structure had been altered as well, clipped and trimmed to remove the roof entirely and give the walls an asymmetrical, artistic sort of half-ruined effect. And the wild brambles were gone, cleared from the crumbling floor which was now replaced by dark, freshly-tilled earth, damp and full of promise. 

"We saved some of the rootstocks of those brambles for you, Miss," Araki announced, leading Juri toward the enormous pile of refuse left by the cleaning effort. "They're roses, if you can believe it. If you were to trim them up and replant them right I'm pretty sure they'd bloom again. That girl in the greenhouse club had an almost uncanny way with these roses, she did. The most astonishing colors . . ." 

Juri stared at the tangle of thorny vines and dirt-encrusted roots. "No roses, thank you," she said very quietly. 

"You must have been here at Ohtori back when that rose club was active," Araki continued as he stomped around over the pile of scrub and brambles. "You seem mighty interested in this garden idea. Were you part of that girl's club?" The man's watery blue eyes grew vague as he struck back through his memories of Ohtori. 

"No," Juri said. "I was in the fencing club. That's all." Her mind shied away from memories of roses and grand battles, revolution and a dark-skinned girl with hair the color of a stormy, night sky. 

Juri grabbed at the handles of the wheelbarrow next to her as she felt a little faint. 

"You need some help bringing in those supplies you've got stacked by the cottage?" Araki asked. 

"No, thank you," Juri replied with a brisk shake of her head, curls flying. "I'd like to do it myself." 

And she truly did. This was a task that she still couldn't quite account for, but she felt very strongly about it. Mr. Araki finally trundled back off to his own work and Juri set about organizing her garden. It took her nearly an hour to haul all of her tools, plants, and materials in from where they were neatly stashed next to the little guest house. She had borrowed an assortment of gardening implements from Mr. Araki's stock and now realized that she had only the vaguest idea of how to proceed. 

Arisugawa Juri was not really the outdoors type. She was elegant and athletic, but tended to keep to herself and out of direct sunlight. Now she wondered why on earth she'd decided to put in a garden as a memorial to Ruka. He hadn't been particularly fond of flowers and plants either, aside from those dratted roses. With a distinctly unfeminine grunt, Juri began to empty plastic sacks of fertilizer and soil into the newly turned flower beds. 

As the day passed, slow and cool, the late spring sun gradually warming the stone-paved pathway around the former greenhouse, Juri grew comfortable with the garden. It was hard labor, working compost into the soil, turning over spadefuls of rich dirt again and again. But it offered a soothing sort of repetition. Only when she was finally satisfied with the composition of the beds, did she begin to lay out the trays of plants according to her grand plan. 

Of course she had a plan. An age-yellowed copy of an old Victorian handbook, _The Language of Flowers_, had turned up in her personal collection a few months ago. Once she realized that she would never find Ruka's grave -- if indeed there was one somewhere out there -- the idea of a tribute garden began to appeal more and more to her subtly romantic nature. Now her intricate blueprint was laid out on a paving stone, the corners of the fine paper weighted down with half-bricks. It was merely a matter of adjusting her garden plan to the unusual shape of the iron-framed bed. 

Juri first installed the vines, arranging them to climb up the iron latticework in an artfully wild manner. The clematis, slim and young, would bloom in varying shades of violet and red. Blue morning glory seedlings were planted at appropriate intervals along the greenhouse's framework so that once the summer sun urged them up the iron, they would bloom brilliant azure against the black of the lattice. 

"The clematis is for artifice, Ruka," Juri murmured aloud, sitting back on her heels to eye her handiwork. "And the morning glory is for vanity." Her lips curled into a ghost of a smile. "We both know you had artifice and vanity to spare, sempai." 

A path of uneven concrete cobbles was laid out in a rough circle through the confines of the ironwork as a sort of informal trail through the garden. To the far north of the circle, Juri planed the young elder tree she had purchased, still in its neat, burlap-wrapped bundle. It wasn't terribly attractive, even once she'd rid it of the burlap and patted the roots into the ground. The branches were clipped severely for transport, giving the little tree a stunted, half-bald look. 

"Poor little thing." Juri gently pulled the plastic labeling tag from the trunk. "You look like you're in mourning too." She watered the transplant, once for misfortune, twice for zealousness. 

Around the elder went the leafy, fragrant herbs: feathery fennel for grief, lemon balm for sympathy, and calendula for sadness, tipped with golden blossoms. Then came the rosemary. "There's rosemary, that's for remembrance," Juri quoted, memories of Ophelia surfacing. "Pray you, love, remember." 

The words rolled off her tongue before she truly realized what she was saying. 

"Not love," she said hoarsely. "You never really loved me, Ruka. You never understood what you asked of me so many years ago." 

It still hurt, those final foggy days of dueling at Ohtori. She'd _known_ that Ruka was sick. Yet he came back. For her. Always for her. 

"Stupid." 

The sharp aroma of crushed herbs pricked Juri back into awareness. Carefully, she relaxed her grip on the finely-divided leaves of her wormwood plant. In her other hand were the rumpled, ferny fronds of tansy. These she planted farther along the pathway, interspersed with ordinary wine-blossomed geraniums. "Absence, hostility, and your great folly, Ruka. Why couldn't you have simply told me? Why did you have to use Shiori to hurt me like you did?" 

Juri didn't expect and answer and none came, only the slowly fading stink of fresh wormwood and old pain. 

Blaming her lightheadedness on the herbal fumes, Juri relocated herself to a great sunny patch of earth near one of the arches of clematis. She marked off the area with small, wooden stakes and began to scatter tiny black seeds from a small sack. The musty scent was a welcome relief. 

"You always liked poppies, didn't you, Ruka?" Juri said to the air. "I hear that the red ones are for consolation, the scarlet ones are for fantastic extravagance, and the white ones are for oblivion. I rather thought you'd approve of all three." 

The poppies were the only seeds she was planing, but the poppies would grow quickly enough to suit her. By the height of summer the garden would be awash with their delicately nodding blossoms, brilliantly colored and gloriously wild, their fine leaves shivering in the breeze. 

Next came more flowers, arranged carefully along the stone-lined path. 

"These iris won't bloom this year," Juri explained, "But they'll be lovely next year. They're yellow and deep purple. I've been told that they represent courage, faith, and a pure heart. Do either of us qualify for those any more?" 

It wasn't likely. Juri had spent nearly a decade running from half-formed memories of Ohtori. Most of them centered around Shiori, who was busy running a travel agency in France, and Ruka, who was dead and gone before Juri realized what he had become. There was courage, perhaps, but their hearts had never been pure and they'd lost what faith they'd had -- long, long ago. 

Violets and pansies were tucked into the hollows between the stones and between other, larger plants. Both were already blooming, the jewel-tone flowers standing out starkly against the soil, white and purple and red and gold. 

"I always liked the combination of violets and pansies," Juri noted absently as she watered the transplants. "They're closely related, yet violets are modest, while the pansies demand attention and adoration." Her eyes flickered closed as a startlingly vivid image of Ruka's face rose before her vision. "I suppose you weren't much of a shrinking violet." 

More geraniums, these scented like roses and limes and nutmeg, were arranged next to the poppies. "Scented geraniums are for happiness, Ruka." The lime scent was strong, overpowering the roses and the nutmeg. "We . . . didn't quite make it to happiness and I don't think I ever truly apologized." 

Juri felt the prickling behind her eyes that heralded tears and fought against them. There was no time for crying. Ruka had been gone for more than ten years. Mourning could certainly wait until she finished the garden. She still had to plant the chamomile, for wisdom and fortitude, amidst the elegant stalks of sweet-scented southernwood, for Ruka's constancy. 

By the entrance to the garden Juri planted two robust lavender shrubs with silvery leaves and dozens of flower stalks, ready to bloom. And finally, there were some tiny basil seedlings, looking pale and tired against the dark soil. 

"That's it, Ruka. I've finished your garden." Juri pulled herself to her feet and stretched stiff muscles. "I'm laying your ghost to rest at last, Tsuchiya Ruka." 

The breeze that whistled down through the bordering colonnade was cooler than she expected. Juri shivered and turned her gaze back to the newly planted garden. It really didn't look very good, actually. It was one thing to intellectually know that the garden wouldn't truly be at its peak until the beginning of August, but it was something entirely different to see just how barren it initially looked. 

But Ruka would have liked it. Juri was sure of that. And now, as she stood in the late afternoon sun, she could imagine that the warmth she felt against her back was the heat radiating from his body. That the faint stirring of her hair across her temple was the rush of his breath. With her eyes closed, she could almost feel Ruka there with her again, in the flesh, warm and strong and terrible and beautiful. 

"The basil is for both love and hate, Ruka," Juri finally said, her voice no louder than a whisper. "You might think it's odd that two such conflicting emotions can be represented by such a mundane herb." Her mouth curled into another smile, one that stretched her face into an unfamiliar expression of simple joy. "But I understand, Ruka. And I think you do too. You understood how I could love you and hate you all at once. Even after Shiori left and I was all alone, you still knew." 

The breath at her ear hitched slightly, as though Ruka had chuckled. The sun on her back flared hot as he pressed closer, his hair dipping forward to brush hers, steel blue against the red-gold of autumn leaves. 

"The lavender, you ask?" Juri leaned back against Ruka's comforting warmth, taking strength from the hardness of his muscles and the soft brush of his fingers against her waist. "Lavender is for devotion, pure and simple." 

"I know." The words rumbled up from Ruka's chest and were muffled in the tangles of her hair. "I always did, my love." 

Juri's throat clenched painfully. The tears were long past, but it still hurt terribly. Ruka's mouth against the smooth column of her neck was a sort of ghostly consolation, but it wasn't enough. The scents of rosemary and lavender were heavy in the air as the sun began to set. Dusk crept over the abandoned courtyard and the new garden within; Juri soon lost the feel of Ruka's arms around her and his breath against her skin. Finally, as the first stars began to appear in the sky, his warmth began to fade from her and she was alone again. 

The pain of that loss was bearable, but only as Juri's blue eyes fixed upon the young almond tree sprouting from the very center of the ring of paving stones did she realize why this garden had become so important to her. 

The almond tree was blooming, its subtle fragrance gradually overpowering the herbs of the garden. 

"A flowering almond," said Juri. "For hope."   
  
  
  
  
  


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Notes: If anyone gets curious about the 'meanings of flowers,' then I have some sources for you. I got quite a bit of my information from my big herb book, Rodale's Illustrated Encyclopedia of Herbs. I wub this book. It's the best. Great for obscure information to dazzle your friends and frighten your family. *ahem* The other source that I used was a website that features a compilation of plant-meanings from several different Victorian sources, http://www.cybercom.net/~klb/flowers.html   
  
  
  


..: fruitbat out :.. 


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